By now I was doing a good impersonation of a pin-cushion. The audience was delighted. There were no more knives left and, for that matter, no slots in which to stick them. But Scarface hadn’t finished. His hand went into his pocket and when it came out he was holding Ugly’s switchblade. He pressed the button and the blade shot out.
The audience fell silent. He bent down over me. I could see the veins throbbing under his skin and one of his eyes had developed a twitch. “There are no more holes, Diamond,” he hissed. “This one is for you.”
“Thirteenth time lucky?” I asked.
He snarled. “You were a fool to meddle in our affairs.”
“I was only doing it for the medals, Scarface,” I said.
“Goodbye…”
He took careful aim. This time he wasn’t going to bother with the box. His eyes were on my throat, right underneath my chin. Slowly, deliberately, he lifted the switchblade in his hand.
The audience waited. In the wings, Ugly leered at me over the unconscious body of Mr Marvano. The switchblade stopped, high above me.
I shut my eyes and waited. There was nothing else I could do.
THE WRONG MAN
The whole scene was frozen in the glare of the spotlights: Scarface, the knife, the waiting audience. Then everything happened at once.
The knife flashed down. There was a gunshot. Scarface screamed and reeled back, clutching his hand. The knife hit the stage and stuck there, quivering, in the wood. Ugly twisted round, trying to see what was happening. Scarface bent over his cradled hand and groaned. Blood seeped out between his fingers and dripped onto his legs.
“Good shot, Ted.”
“Thanks, Ed.”
“Lower the curtain, Red.”
The men from M16 had sprung out of nowhere. Now they swarmed over the stage while the audience — evidently in a good mood — gave them a cheerful round of applause. Ugly had put up a token resistance. One of the agents had given him a token punch on the nose and now he was out cold. Two more of them dragged Mr Marvano off while Ed and Ted grabbed hold of Scarface himself. His hand was bleeding very badly now. Ted’s bullet had smashed right through it, and I can’t say I was sorry.
Red lowered the curtain. Ted came over to me. He was wearing the same dark suit he’d had on at the London International the first time we’d met, and the same sunglasses. But now he took off the shades and looked me straight in the eyes.
“Are you OK, kid?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. I was fine — except that I still couldn’t move.
Ted opened the box. “That was some trick,” he said.
“They probably do it with mirrors,” I agreed.
Then Tim came in between two more agents. Ned and Zed, perhaps.
“We found him outside,” one of them said. “He was hiding in a dustbin.”
“Rubbish!” Tim exclaimed.
“Yes. He was hiding in the rubbish.”
Tim shook himself free and came over to me. “Are you OK?” he asked.
“I’m fine,” I said. But it wasn’t true. I’d been chased enough. I felt as if I hadn’t stopped running for weeks. I turned to Ted. Or maybe it was Ed. “Please. I want to go home,” I said.
“I’m very glad to see you,” Mr Waverly said. “As soon as I got a report that you were in Amsterdam, I realized that you’d gone after Charon. So I sent my agents over to look after you. They spotted you just in time. Luckily for you…”
Tim and I had been flown over to London and now we were back more or less where we’d begun; at Number Seventeen, Kelly Street. Only this time there was no Bodega Birds. The headquarters of MI6 was just how it had been the first time, with Mr Waverly examining us with his hooded grey eyes over the polished leather surface of his desk. Ted and Ed stood guard by the door.
“You may have rescued us,” I said. “But it was you who got us into this mess to start with.”
Mr Waverly shrugged. “That was really your own fault,” he said. “How were we to know that Charon would try to kill you?”
He sounded innocent but I knew better. Mr Waverly had somehow let Charon know that we were working for MI6. He had drugged us and dumped us. We were his sitting targets. And when he had sent his men across to Amsterdam, it hadn’t been to rescue us. It had been to find Charon.
“I expect you have a lot of questions,” Mr Waverly said.
“I’ve got one,” Tim cut in. “What happened to the birds?”
“The birds?” It took the head of MI6 a moment to work out what he was talking about. “Oh — you mean Bodega Birds. That was just a front. We had to do that. You see, we couldn’t allow you to get the police involved.”
“Sure,” I agreed. “They might have found out that it was you who paid Charon to kill Boris Kusenov.”
That got him. For one second his eyes were unguarded and I saw the panic that was hiding behind those small, faded pupils. Behind him, Ted and Ed shifted uneasily. All three of them were like guilty schoolboys who had just been caught smoking behind the gym. “How did you find out?” Waverly asked.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the cheque that I had found in Charon’s drawer. “I found this,” I said.
Mr Waverly hardly needed to look at it. He knew what it was. He coughed and ran a hand through his hair. “I have to congratulate you,” he said. “You’ve been very resourceful.”
“So why did you do it?” I demanded. “If you wanted to stop Charon, why did you pay him in the first place?”
Waverly sighed. I think he was actually relieved to get the confession off his chest. “It was an operation that went horribly wrong,” he began.
“I’m sorry,” Tim chimed in. “I didn’t know you’d been ill.”
“I haven’t been ill, Mr Diamond!” Waverly paused. This was going to be more difficult than he’d thought. “We had to find Charon,” he went on at last. “Too many people had died. Not just in England. America. France. Even Russia. It was always Charon. So we decided to mount an operation to bring him in. To unmask him. And we came up with an idea. The simplest way to find him was to become his client.”
“How did you do that?” I asked.
“It was easy. He had a number of agents working for him. The man who knocked out the magician, for example. We got a message to them. They passed it to Charon.”
“So you hired him to kill Kusenov.”
“Yes. We chose Kusenov because we knew he had no intention of coming to England. He doesn’t like England. In fact he never leaves Moscow. In other words, in order to kill him, Charon would have to go to Russia. And so of course, there was something he would need…”
“An aeroplane?” Tim suggested.
“A visa. You can’t enter Russia without a visa. Don’t you see? It was brilliant. All we had to do was monitor all the people applying for a visa to Russia and one of them would have to be Charon. And of course if anyone who applied for a visa had only nine fingers…”
“So you never really wanted Kusenov dead.”
“Oh no. That was just the point. We were certain that Charon would be unable to kill him. He was meant to be an impossible target.”
Suddenly I understood. Waverly was right. It had been a brilliant plan until it had gone terribly wrong. “But Kusenov decided to come to England after all!” I said.
